Currently, concrete placing booms are used at large work sites such as the construction of a multi-floored building for placing concrete in hard to access locations. Typically, the concrete placing boom is removably mounted to a support structure, such as a pumping tower, that passes through the developing floor structure of a building, and extends above a working surface such that concrete can be supplied from above. The concrete placing boom can be removed from one pumping tower and lifted such as by a crane to another pumping tower, if desired.
The pumping tower holding the concrete placing boom can be supported by the ground floor structure and/or by the floor structures through which the pumping tower passes. In the latter situation, there needs to be a mechanism by which the floor structures support the pumping tower after the pumping tower is raised by either an on-site crane or a specially designed climbing system that hydraulically jacks the tower up using the floor structures as the support base.
Regardless of the means used for lifting the concrete placing boom and the pumping tower, on-site workers must mechanically add some means of securing the support mechanism once the pumping tower is raised to a certain floor position aligned with the support mechanism. This typically involves lining up holes for pin(s) to be inserted or a protrusion or cradle method. Both methods are labor intensive and time consuming, and are known to be user-unfriendly involving a great deal of worker manipulation while operating with a tower crane and inexact openings. Some support mechanisms exist in which outriggers are powered to move feet or other members into engagement with stubs or other support members at desired levels of the building being constructed. However, these arrangements are generally complex in nature and can be unreasonably expensive.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a simplified yet highly effective support system for supportably securing a vertically movable tower to a floor structure of a building in a manner which greatly decreases the time and effort involved in securing the tower. Further, there is a need to provide a tower-to-floor support system which is substantially automatic and employs a set of support brackets which do not require any additional power mechanism for effecting their movement during securement of the tower to the floor structure. Additionally, there is a need for a tower-to-floor support system that can be used regardless of the means used to raise the tower relative to the floor structure.